The 19th of December 2010 saw presidential elections in Belarus, and with them came three very predictable things. The incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, won; the West declared the election fraudulent; and the Belarusian opposition staged a protest leading to arrests.

Western bourgeois media and governments would have us believe that these three outcomes were all the result of a non-democratic electoral process, involving election-rigging by ‘Europe’s last dictator’. The reality, as is so often the case, is very different.

An introduction to Comrade Mao Zedong’s seminal article on the role of practice in the development of human knowledge, and the relationship between theory and practice.

Mao Zedong began his famous article on practice by stating that “man’s activities in production determine all other activities”. Mankind, he explained, is defined by its relationship, through activity, to the means of production. In today’s society we are proletarian or bourgeois, exploited or exploiter, etc.

The oppressed people of the world are striking out against imperialism. Blow after blow, they inflict defeat after defeat. Bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, the vast resources of US and British imperialism are being squandered fighting a losing battle against the peoples of the earth and the tide of history.

Anti-imperialist struggles are being heroically waged in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, where the people have suffered at the sharp end of imperialism’s vicious assault on human dignity. But in their fight against imperialism, the oppressed peoples of the world are not alone; they are joined by many thousands of progressive and peace-loving people in the centres of imperialism, who understand that every blow against imperialism is a blow against their own ruling classes.

How the restoration of capitalism has destroyed Kyrgyzstan:
Ethnic conflict among the country’s poor has its root in the betrayal of socialism. Communism remains the answer.

The troubles in Kyrgyzstan came to the attention of the world on 6 April in Talas, which is in the north of the country close to the Kazakh border.

Recent events

An anti-government demonstration turned violent, and sparked off a series of further anti-government demonstrations, despite the authorities imposing a state of emergency on 7 April. The government responded by arresting many opposition leaders, and the opposition in turn retaliated by occupying the internal security headquarters and a state TV channel in the capital, Bishkek (formerly Frunze).

With June 2010 marking the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of US imperialism’s bestial war against the Korean people, which, over the ensuing three years, claimed some four million lives, tensions remain high on the Korean peninsula, involving not simply a confrontation between the socialist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north on the one hand and the United States and its south Korean ally on the other, but also sharply increased tensions between the USA and China.